King's College London - Faculty of Arts & Humanities

MA in Arts and Cultural Management

This Arts and Cultural Management master’s is designed to meet the needs of today’s arts and cultural managers and professionals across a variety of organisations. It emphasises creativity and criticality, and includes opportunities for arts-based learning, teaching you a range of core competencies that will kick-start your career in arts and cultural management.

Thanks to a distinctive mix of theoretical and practical elements, you’ll graduate with developed skills in applying creative leadership and ethical principles in managing artistic excellence, cultural heritage, audience diversity, financial sustainability, and more, at local and global levels.

Key benefits

• Kick-start your career through focused teaching that prioritises creativity and criticality and includes opportunities for arts-based learning.
• Gain insights into management, planning, programming, and leadership.
• Develop knowledge of arts and culture across national and international contexts.
• Expand your network and learn from leading arts and cultural industry professionals during guest lectures and workshops.
• Enjoy strong links with London's cultural organisations.
• Join a vibrant Culture, Media & Creative Industries Department that specialises in the field.

Course essentials

During this master's in Arts & Cultural Management, you will tackle theoretical and practical debates surrounding different aspects of arts and cultural management, including audiences, access, finance, cultural policy, cultural production, cultural value, and leadership.

You will learn about the vital importance of creativity within 21st-century cultural organisations, and discover the opportunities and challenges posed by new technologies.

You’ll begin this Arts & Cultural Management MA with your first core module focused on key issues in the context, theory, and debates concerning arts and cultural management. By exploring the tactical, logistical, and strategic challenges involved in managing art in today’s rapidly changing globalised world, you will consider how cultural leadership and the creation of art can have a range of societal benefits. This will help you critically evaluate the relationship between arts, culture, and management, and to develop your own thinking about how arts and cultural management could develop in the future.

The second core module of this Arts and Cultural Management MA further bridges the gap between theory and practice. You will learn from a diverse group of leading arts and cultural organisations and senior arts and cultural managers. This gives you the rare opportunity to hear first-hand how practitioners deal with the day-to-day challenges of arts and cultural management and discover the skills, processes, and concepts that are used in the real world. You will put what you learn into practice by responding to live briefs that the guest speakers will set, reflecting real-world situations within their organisations.

For the rest of the course, you will also choose from a broad list of optional modules to further tailor your expertise. You could work on developing your own creative idea into an entrepreneurial project, learn about how the music industry makes money, consider the role of festivals in the creative economy, or explore the dynamic relationship between culture and the market. Or you might opt to learn how to manage collections in museums and collecting organisations, study cultural policy or cultural memory, and examine the children’s media industries—and beyond.

Your master’s in Arts & Cultural Management will culminate in a dissertation. You could work on a traditional dissertation that explores a topic of your choice in greater detail or choose from one of the two alternatives. One option is to find an organisation to partner with and use their resources for your research (Collaborative), and the other is to create your own arts-based research project and use your own practice as part of the research process (Creative).

Previous students have partnered with a range of cultural organisations for their dissertation project, including Battersea Arts Centre, Black Live Theatre, Arts Council England, Dash Arts, King’s Cultural Institute, Live Cinema, Glyndebourne, Mahogany Opera Group, Lambeth Archives, OnRoad Media, Royal Society, Arts Cabinet, Bethlem Museum of the Mind, Bridport Literary Prize, Victoria and Albert Museum, Locarno International Film Festival and Greater London Authority.

Duration: One year full-time, two years part-time, September to September